Archive | Great Transition RSS feed for this section

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

15 Aug

Warren Buffet shoujld know; he’s one  of the richest of the super-rich.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

via Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com.

Big Pink

14 Aug

IMGP2087rd

IMGP2122rd

IMGP2078rd

End America’s Wars: Bring the Troops Home

12 Aug

ComeHomeAmerica.us has a petition going. Please go over there and sign it. As Brother James used to sing, Please, Please, Please.

From the letter/petition:

It is time to end all of these wars. It is time to initiate a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy away from domination of others through military strength and damaging sanctions. As a first step we urge a major withdrawal of soldiers from Afghanistan–as candidate Obama promised in 2008. This withdrawal should be at least as large as the 63,000 troop escalation the President put in place early in his presidency. This withdrawal should be defined as a clear first step to a complete withdrawal of all soldiers and private contractors from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. It is time to return to our Founders’ declared conception of the United States as a democratic Republic and not an Empire.

Stop Using Chimps as Guinea Pigs – NYTimes.com

11 Aug

But in the years since, our understanding of its effect on primates, as well as alternatives to it, have made great strides, to the point where I no longer believe such experiments make sense — scientifically, financially or ethically. That’s why I have introduced bipartisan legislation to phase out invasive research on great apes in the United States.

Today is the start of a two-day public hearing convened by the Institute of Medicine, which is examining whether there is still a need for invasive chimpanzee research. Meanwhile, nine countries, as well as the European Union, already forbid or restrict invasive research on great apes. Americans have to decide if the benefits to humans of research using chimpanzees outweigh the ethical, financial and scientific costs.

via Stop Using Chimps as Guinea Pigs – NYTimes.com.

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? – Magazine – The Atlantic

11 Aug

Don Peck, in the Atlantic.

Plutonomy, an economy in which the economy activity of the top 1% of the income stream.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing.

The Great Recession has been a Great Sorter, shifting people out of the middle class:

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.

Housing crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in comparison.

More excerpts below the fold. Continue reading →

Ninja Light Don’t Lie

11 Aug

speckled leaves.jpg

Open Letter to a Mutant Ninja Senator

11 Aug

From Charlie Keil:

"In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama also called for
 building a new generous of safe, clean nuclear power plants as a vital component
 of his national clean energy program."
             from Sen. Joe Lieberman's letter to me of April 29th, 2011

wonder how 'generous' came to replace 'generation'
at the center of this lie-packed satanic sentence
what "Union" could we possibly be talking about
what "safe" when any one person
           can mortar a nukeplant into powdered poison
           can put a garden hose siphon into the fuel pool
           can fall asleep at the switch or twist x instead of y
           can have sex with a bored co-worker          
                       while the core melts down          
                       or the aging pipes leak more and more
            count the human errors that could occur
            much more probable than earthquakes
 what "clean"
            list the half-lives that cut our lives in half
            the daily eco-devastation of overheated waters
            again the dirty list is long
 what "vital" when death dealing radiation          
                       lasts for thousands upon thousands of years
            "energy" in this form is pure ENTROPY
            destroying the speciation before our eyes
 only the complete failure of the US schools
            can account for this letter
                                  this death sentence

Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy

10 Aug

How dare a credit rating agency that got it so wrong, and should itself be investigated for malfeasance in the creation of the banking meltdown, dictate public policy? For S&P to insist on massive government cuts that would only increase joblessness is like a burglar shifting blame for his crimes to the poor quality of locks.

This from a credit rating agency that, as NYT columnist Joe Nocera points out, “has consistently fallen short.” S&P judged Enron to be an exemplary company until shortly before the corporation imploded, and it gave its triple-A seal of approval to the toxic securitized mortgage debt that caused the great recession. There are serious problems with the US economy, but they are not the ones that Standard & Poor’s outlined when it sent the stock market into a tizzy.

via Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy | The Nation.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 2

9 Aug

Part 1 here

Where were we? Ah, the SK8park has been destroyed as preparation for construction that never happened, presumably because of the 2008 financial melt down that’s still just oozing along and seems like it’s going to raise the cost of crossing the Hudson, but . . . back to the story.

The park’s patrons were not happy:

shoot-me

“Someone shoot me,” it says, “used to be the fucking coolest place.” Then, a few days later, another sign appeared:

city hall meeting.jpg

Could’a knocked me over with an aerosol blast. Who in City Hall, I asked myself, gives a crap about these kids and their illegal but hard-won park? I was curious, and went to the meeting. Four skaters, one councilman, Steve Fulop, and me, that was the meeting. Fulop asked the skaters if they could get more skaters to come to a rescheduled meeting. They said they could. Fulop scheduled another meeting for Monday 19 November. I told the councilman that I would donate photos of the site Jersey City’s library so that there would be a permanent record of the park, which I did a week or so later. Continue reading →

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems. …

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

via Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →